"I have a meeting with the president," Mulvaney told reporters during a brief event. "I'm leaving here right now and taking it straight to the Oval Office," as Trump prepared for his first international trip as Chief Executive.

"The very first person to actually get a chance to read this is gonna be the president," Mulvaney said.

Details of the budget have not yet been revealed publicly. Reporters and camera crews who were allowed to see the materials being printed, bound, and loaded onto pallets were cautioned against trying to get a sneak peek among any of the volumes that were being turned from the GPO's machinery.

As Mulvaney left the printing plant, he acknowledged that the budget that emerges from Congress will be very different than the spending proposals in the four-volume set.

"They do help define the debate," he told Sinclair, "and that's what this is really all about."

But Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, declined to speculate on the biggest challenges his budget blueprint may face getting past House and Senate lawmakers. "Listen, there's no shortage of arguments on Capitol Hill these days about anything," Mulvaney said.

GPO officials are printing about 20,000 copies of the four-volume FY2018 budget. The spending plan has also been online since the mid-1990s, reducing the number of hard copies from 100,000 issues 20 years ago. Officials say electronic retrievals have averaged some two million downloads the past five years.